11/23/97 .. Shocking your system.

Everyone went to the doctor this week, or felt like it. Bagel had a recurring hematoma on one ear, requiring surgery, Peggy had a internal false alarm, CC wounded her foot, and I grabbed a bare wire in the cyberbox. We're all OK now, thank you. Just adjusting to a change of season.

Last week's snow, about a foot here, slumped in the midday sun each day, until it was quite good sunrise skiing. CC and I limped out each morning after dawn, and made a circuit around the airfield. Staying well out in clear view, as the deer are in rut and the boys are getting excited, too.

Each blade of grass and dead flower rising from the snow was feathered out with frost crystals in the mist, dazzling in the low angled sun. The field was a labyrinth of deer tracks. They must come out dancing in the moonlight. No wonder my late night sketches were full of deer dancers.

Neither CC nor I have been up for too arduous a trek in the icy air. We are getting acclimated to winter again, circling wider each morning. I see that Frank has tromped out an X-country circuit that intersects mine. I almost never see Frank. He's a dawn canoer, while I wait for the wind to get up for my day sailing. He cuts a bit of firewood in his lot, which abuts the gully behind here, and I cross his tote roads in other seasons. Sometimes I encounter him in the stacks at the college, where his office is. We nod. A highly regarded essayist who write about this place, we never have a word to say to each other.

I encountered Andy out Bernard's road one morning. He was just back from a week up to camp with Phil. Phil has given a new meaning to the term "still hunting," Andy reports. Rigged up a coil off the stove at camp, he's making hooch out of Welch's grape juice mixed with yeast and sugar. Cooked off a couple of quarts so far this hunting season, mixed them with cheap wine, and had a headthumping good time.

My father calls that mix "goof," and says it was a staple of the Northland in his youth, often substituting ginger ale for muscatel. Ah that Canadian sophistication. Andy says Phil hasn't gotten his deer. Pretty hard when they clearcut all the acreage within five miles of your camp. Used to be he could make venison by shooting out a stovepipe he had run through the wall, pointed at his apple tree. No more. Time to make goof.

Big Mike got his, though. Same way he did last year. Mike is kinda large, and doesn't skip about the way he once did. Last year he went out into the woods with a sheetrock bucket, sat down on it, and fell asleep. Woke to find a buck nosing around, and bagged him. Did it again yesterday. Now there's a guy who knows how to call deer out of the dreamland.

My dreamland dancers have turned from deer to stone. This earth mystery portrait I'm about has turned into a ring of stones. The lady in the piece, Candy, took a tour of megalithic sites across the pond a few years back, and gave me pictures of Avebury and the like, as points of departure. My sketches have seen standing stones move forward from incidental backgrounds, until they surround the subject. All the cavorting animal spirits have evaporated, and the stones begun to lean and sway.

A graphical dance. In two dimensions. Trying to find that place where a rock and a dancing woman meet, without belying one another, on paper. A fascinating reduction of melded forms.

Candy set some stringent limits on this piece. She's very self-conscious, and absolutely refused to let me carve her face. Which is silly, of course, as she has a wonderfully expressive face, full of ruddy roundness and twinkling joy. But it's a great challenge, to do a symbolic likeness without showing her face.

I followed her around the labyrinth she and Fred constructed in their woods, with a camera one rainy afternoon, and caught a couple of likely poses. Now she is moving with the rhythms of the megaliths toward Glastonbury Tor.

Aside from the symbolic material, the lesson of this piece seems to be how media inform one another. Fred and Candy are stained glass artists. This portrait is in return for a wedding present they made for my sister. Years ago I did Fred, as a wildman in a canoe with his dog.. an hiwire act that still paddles across their home space.. in exchange for the stained glass landscape that colors our entry. As this piece for Candy has evolved it has taken on the structure of a glass window. Become almost 2-dimensional. The cutout figures in the foreground are in high relief, flattening as the scene recedes, until the background is almost marquetry.. all mounted in a hanging frame. It looks a lot like the early puzzles I used to make, with carved pieces for the negative spaces. I've got it about half composed at his point.

I considered mounting it on glass, so light could shine through the epoxy between the carved pieces.. a sort of joke on translucence, but rejected the idea as too clumsy. Not that the process hasn't had its fumbles. I've never done so many drawings before picking up the wood before. Unquestionably the result of thinking with ink and watercolor so much.. and many of the sketches have gone to the limit of finished color-wash drawings.

I've scanned some of the sketches, to ship as illustrations to e-mail texts, and edited others together in layered collage on the computer. Very close to stained glass in effect, these cutform images with the electronic light shining through them. And I've actually cut out paper mockups of the forms to carve for the "finished" piece. A very different approach for me. Almost a middleground between the graphic and the tactile. I can see this image easily translated into woodcut, or up on a website, or as a computer print.

Is that a betrayal of the gift? Among the electronic criticisms I was shocked with last week were a number of heartfelt suggestions that I shut up with the netstuff, and get back to my real work. I just feel lucky to be inspired to create in any medium on any day. It's such a struggle. I've been energized and enthused by drawing, and writing these musings, and playing in digitopolis.. and am grateful for the charge. I'm not going to stop carving.

But the carving is going to change. It always does. It has to grow, or it dies. If all this fiddling with phosphors is twisting the sculpture, it's bending it toward the graphical, squashing it flatter. rolling it like dough. Well.. ain't that a hoot? Does spending time in cyberspace make us more two-dimensional? Is that what the angry outburst was about... folks feeling they were being put through the wringer? Maybe.

Like Candy, I've had to turn my back on the voices. Move into that circle of stones in the moonlight. I'm glad a few of you still want to come dancing.

It's been snowing on and off for two more days now, and the skiing is superb. It doesn't seem like too many people are into winter sport yet. Like this is just a bad dream, and we'll be back in that balmy fall again tomorrow. Maybe everyone is just cranky because the hard chill is here. Or they are just too busy to go stand in the snow, and let the dust blow off.